The Most Important Moment.

As I was looking through my pictures last night, I can't help but feel that they don't capture what I truly saw and did. Because when you are proclaiming the gospel to many for the first time, capturing a picture is not on your mind. Or when you walk into hut after hut of immense poverty, your heart breaks and you would never dream of insulting those people by taking a picture. When a little girl who has a heart murmur so dangerous that it could kill her comes to the medical clinic, a picture is not what is going to help save her life. And when you're dancing marimba for 3 hours with Mayans and Guatemalan, sweatier than you've been in months there is no time to stop for pictures because they are all waiting for a chance to dance with you. There is no picture to capture of the joy in a family of Mayan little girls when you sneak off to the river to bathe with them and they get to use shampoo for the very first time. It is hard to put it all into words, and I know I won't be able to. I am fully aware that I have experienced things in my time in Guatemala that most people would never even dream of. I have lived among the unreached. I have seen poverty. And I thank God for each and every moment of it, because I will never be a normal American again.

As time allots I will begin telling you the stories one by one. I will try to capture the moments the best I can, and to start I will share the moment out of all of them that broke me the most. We had been to the mountains, been to one of the biggest drug lord villages in Guatemala, and been to the Mayan jungle already, but the moment that will forever be etched in my memory happened at the all familiar orphanage at Hope of Life with the kids that I love.

It was Friday night and we had just returned from the jungle that day. Another team of Americans were having a movie night for the orphans with popcorn and all sorts of fun stuff. Living right next to the orphanage, we decided to join them. As it got later, Marcos began to get tired because it was way past his bedtime. As he fell asleep in my lap, one of the older girls that was sitting with us whispered to me, "He prays for you everyday." Making sure I had heard her right, I repeated her and found that, yes I had understood her. In that moment, my heart melted. A four year old little boy prays for me? Only two weeks prior I was hoping he even remembered me. As it turns out I'm quite possibly the most important person in his life.

Saying goodbye to him the next night was one of the hardest things I have ever had to do. Telling him I wouldn't be back for at least a year nearly killed me. So much is going to happen in his life between now and then. As I told him that I loved him he nodded with a look of desperation in his face. The desperate need for the love that I give him every day of his life. As I left him in the door of his house, I felt like a piece of my heart had been torn out. I went on to tell some of the others goodbye, with one of our guards waiting in the truck to take us back down the mountain, and looked up to see that he had snuck out of his house and was sitting in the comedor crying. As I carried him back to his house and told him bye once more, my heart began to sink even further.

Lord willing, one day I won't have to say goodbye to him again. But for now I left my favorite little man behind, and with him is a big chunk of my heart.